How Internal Backlinks Boosts Your SEO

How Internal Backlinks Boosts Your SEO

Backlinks are clickable links that essentially hold the World Wide Web together in one piece. They come in two forms:

• Internal – These are the ones that are found on your own domain.
• External – These are the ones that are found outside of your own domain and point back to you.

Both types of backlinks are incredibly important, and basic external backlinks are crucial to bringing more sales and revenue to your online business. However, when you decide to publish an article or a blog post, you need to make sure that you’re also linking it somewhere on your very own site. When done properly, this will help boost your SEO rankings, get readers to peruse your online content, and, ultimately, drive more traffic to your site.

Throughout the rest of this article, you will learn more about what you need to be doing to get backlinks to work to your advantage.

Tapping into the Secrets of Internal Link Building

Internal backlinks essentially connect two pages or posts to each other. This can be done a couple of different ways – by text or image content. It is more common to link via text than images due to the fact that it flows more naturally.

Using Anchor Text to Increase Value

Webmasters tend to use key phrases to link directly as they are creating internal hyperlinks. For example, if you want to link back to an apple pie recipe, the hyperlink would likely be anchored to the key phrase “apple pie recipe” in an article. This is often referred to as “exact match anchor text link building”. However, it is frowned upon by many marketers.

When link building, you do have other options, though, including:

• The Naked URL – This means that you will copy and paste the actual URL into the body of your article without attaching it to text or images.
• Untargeted Anchor Text – This is very similar to the exact match linking principle exact you won’t have targeted keywords to the URL that you are linking it to. For example, you may hyperlink keywords like “See more,” or “Click here”.

Are any of these options recommended?

To be honest, not really. And here is why.

It all points back to Google. The search engine giant wants things to be as natural as possible, and the aforementioned link building options that have been mentioned tend to look manipulated. If you are reading through content and come across any of those, you probably won’t click on them. Instead, the best option is one that is about to be explained – one that is much more integrated.

If you had a sentence that looked like this one:

“healthy, delicious Granny Smith apple pie recipe instructions”

You don’t want to focus on the key phrase “Apple pie” in this sentence. You also don’t’ want to add “Click here to see it” at the end and add the hyperlink there. Instead, you want to focus on the ENTIRE sentence and create a hyperlink for it. Here’s why:

• You will be using the exact match words, but you won’t be targeting a specific, single phrase.
• You will minimize the chances that there will be a duplicate link appearing on your site in the future (which Google does NOT like).
• You will be increasing the diversity of links within your link building project.
• You will be increasing the relevance of your linked content to readers, which increases the chances that they will actually click on the link.
• You will appeal to Google’s demand that you are focusing on an organic and unique approach.

For most individuals, this is a whole new link building concept. For some, though, it is like second nature them and they realize how effective it is.

However, there is more to truly taking advantage of internal links.

Putting the Link Wheels into Motion

If you have experience with link building, then you probably know that Google does not like external link wheels. So, why even talk about such a concept? Well, that’s because there is a benefit to internal link wheels. Internal link wheels have the ability to reduce your bounce rates, build on the interconnectedness of your website, and increase the time that your visitors stay on your site.

So, how exactly does an internal link wheel work?

• Post 1 will link to Post 2
• Post 2 will link to Post 3
• Post 3 will link back to Post 1

It all comes back full circle. You can do three posts, five posts, or however many posts that you want, but you don’t want to let things get too out of hand. The ideal number is five. Now, the point with this is that visitors can move away from one post and get right back to where they initially started.

If you noticed, the term “posts” was used above. However, if your site is being run on WordPress, then you have pages in addition to blog posts. Will this make a difference. Yes, but we will touch on this in just a bit. Let’s briefly discuss the difference between posts and pages.

Posts vs. Pages

Posts work to constantly update a blog on a website, while pages tend to be static. While you can update the pages of a website, they tend to remain in one place. There are advantages of each one, and there is debate on how to implement each of them.

It is recommended that pages are used for focal content, such as the services that a business offers. Any other content that you want to provide should be used as posts. Posts can be used to form link wheels, and pages can be used in tiers.

Utilizing Tiered Link Building Strategies

The bulk of your site’s content is built on your pages, which is the top tiers. There should be somewhere between three to five of these. Dedicate at least one page to each one of your main products or services.

Once you have a link to each of these tiers, you want to ensure that each of your other pages on your site points to one of them at minimum. This is an internal tiered link wheel and can be incredibly powerful. You will be rewarded by Google for this, as your project continues to grow.

If you haven’t already started working to raise your SEO with link building, now is the time to do it. The aforementioned information can help you not only boost your SEO, keep your visitors on your website longer, lower your overall bounce rates, and bring in more revenues for your business. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us at WebDetail.